Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Sleep Gunner is working working day and night on rehearsals/music for The High Lonesome, a piece by choreographer Hillary Blake Firestone for Conny Janssen Danst. The High Lonesome opens in Rotterdam on 10 December.

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The High Lonesome

Square Dancing: an American folkdance based on constantly shifting group patterns, whose beauty is refined spatial virtuosity. Sleep Gunner: two Amsterdam-based guitar players devoted to the complex harmonies of 1950s Alabama heartbreak duo The Louvin Brothers. The High Lonesome: a performance that takes its inspiration, forms, physicality and pleasure from Square Dance; its four songs -with lyrics of longing for home and memories of familiar things- from the Louvins' catalog; and its structure from a country jamboree. Or, The High Lonesome: a band of six whose numbers are all about one thing: space and place, presence and absence, longing and belonging.

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This is the attempting-to-be-resuscitated online repository for Groningen-based guitarist, lapsteel toucher, arranger/assembler, and sound editor, Mark Morse, aka (dj) morsanek aka Morsanek aka etc etc etc. I took a break from music again last year, and what's out here currently is kind of a disorganized mess. If you're just interested in music only, you could either go to SoundCloud for my solo stuff, or here under the Recordings tag here for other situations, click here to filter on that.

I also teach private guitar lessons, specifically aimed at getting students over the hump from frustrated beginner to having enough basic technique and fretboard knowledge to be able to start figuring out what kind of guitar player they want to be.

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My ongoing struggle with being a non-repetitive, idiom-resistant improvising guitarist often finds me attempting to use prepared guitar as a sort of sampler or emulator, and generally experiments with the limits of texture as narrative glue. I also like working with handheld amplifiers and feedback.

I'm not doing much laptop work these days, but when I did, my assemblings have always been influenced by the rhythms and techniques of film editing, and...texturally I'm pretty fascinated by timbral combinations involving both instrumental and non-instrumental sounds. I also like to play with the differences between "chance music" and group improvisation and the role of the listener in discovering or manufacturing structure within either. Call me.

In addition to playing kind of regularly in ad hoc improv ensembles around Amsterdam, I used to be a full- or part-time member of a few irregularly performing and/or possibly defunct entities:

Morsanek: Tended to be the catch-all for sample-based constructions, performances, or edits/mixes, usually just me but not always, and frankly it's a name that's not getting much use anymore unless I'm DJing, that is unless I'm DJing ass2ass with Felicia von Zweigbergk, then we're usually called something else corporate-sounding like Von Zweigbergk & Morse.Sleep Gunner: guitar duo paying homage to 1950s heartbreak duo The Louvin Brothers, with composer/guitar hero Jeroen Kimman. Website hereHidden Pincer: (Still) "in development", designed to rip off Young Marble Giants, ESG, Brainiac, and The Aislers Set in equal measure. Could also be called Fungo Setting if we're not careful.Light Metal Trio: improvising duo/trio interested in unstable aluminum foil preparations. With me on tabletop doubleneck, Dirk Bruinsma on baritone sax and Santiago Botero on double bass and living in South America.Daddy's Balls: Eternally fictional duo with John Dikeman bearing an as-yet-undefined focus, certainly something horrifying. It'll either be called this or Shitpickle or Cumming Dairy Queen. Super Hardon Collider: impaired no-wave jazz with most of the loud boys from Cactus Truck plus Rune Lohse on drums and Scandinavian reserve. Exact spelling TBD.The Family Tapes: no-effects electric guitar quintet exploring an anti-wanking approach to ensemble improvising, critcally lauded during their 4 days of existence. Website here.Minister Kebab: Defunct but an old favorite. With Hilary Jeffery on trombone and tromboscillator and Alan "Gunga" Purves on all manner of homemade percussion, plus me on samplers, feedback, and analog electronics. Influences or resulting resonances include Throbbing Gristle, La Monte Young, and cartoon Scottish-Haitian pipe bands. Recordings here.The Durians: Mysterious two-decade-old Atlanta-based improvised art rock quartet featuring the ultra-pithy verbal stylings of high-school teacher/Dante translator Terrill Soules.